The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.